Grand Valley Dani, or simply Dani, is one of the most populous

Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...

in Indonesian New Guinea (also known as Papua). The Dani people live in the

Baliem Valley The Baliem Valley ( id, Lembah Baliem; also spelled Balim and sometimes known as the Grand Valley) is a valley of the Central Highlands in Western New Guinea. Specifically in Highland Papua, Indonesia, which is inhabited mainly by the Dani peopl ...

of the Western Highlands.

Dialects

Dialectical differentiation is great enough that ''Ethnologue'' assigns separate codes to three varieties: *Lower *Mid or Central, also known as Tulem *Upper Lower Grand Valley Dani contains subdialects Lower Grand Valley Hitigima (Dani-Kurima, Kurima), Upper Bele, Lower Bele, Lower Kimbin (Kibin), and Upper Pyramid. Hupla, traditionally considered a separate language, is closer to Lower Grand Valley than the varieties of Grand Valley Dani are to each other.

Phonology

Grand Valley Dani has established its own orthography during a conference between linguists of the

Dutch New Guinea Dutch New Guinea or Netherlands New Guinea ( nl, Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea, id, Nugini Belanda) was the western half of the island of New Guinea that was a part of the Dutch East Indies until 1949, later an overseas territory of the Kingd ...

government and different missionary bodies on February 1961. This is the phonology of the Central Grand Valley Dani language:

Consonants

Unlike other orthographies of local languages in Indonesia (largely based on the standard orthography), the original Grand Valley Dani orthography (the current one might be not known) has ''j'' instead of ''y'', in common with the Indonesian old spelling. * The letters ⟨p, t, k⟩ are pronounced as aspirated /, , / in word-initial position and as , in intervocalic positions, respectively. They merge with voiceless /, , / syllable-finally, which is also represented by graphic voiced consonants ⟨b, d, g⟩. However, aspirated consonants still occur intervocalically, see below. * The phoneme merges with preceding or following phonemes: ** It aspirates preceding ⟨p, t, k⟩, creating effectively phonemic aspirated consonants in intervocalic positions (''japha'' "they fought"). ** It also compensatorily lengthened adjacent vowel or sonorants (except , ), however, one element of the most adjacent lengthened vowel to is devoiced (''wamhe'' "pig (with connective morpheme)").

Vowels

Grammar

Verbs

Verbs in Grand Valley Dani are highly inflected for many tenses.

Infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...

is marked by the suffix ''-in'', although verb stems in ''-s-'' change to ''-t-'' before consonants: ''wetasin'' "to roast", but ''wetathy'' "I roasted".

Finite tenses

Although there are claimed "default" personal markers, the correspondences between tense suffixes and personal markers are often highly irregular. Nevertheless, inflections of verbs are still highly regular. Unless denoted in the table, verb forms are marked by personal markers.

Semantics

The Dani language differentiates only two basic colours, ''mili'' for cool/dark shades such as blue, green, and black, and ''mola'' for warm/light colours such as red, yellow, and white. This trait makes it an interesting field of research for language psychologists, such as

Eleanor Rosch Eleanor Rosch (once known as Eleanor Rosch Heider;"Natural Categories", Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 3, (May 1973), p. 328. born 1938) is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, s ...

, investigating the Whorf hypothesis.